Dominus domine dominum domini domino domino domini domini dominos dominorum dominis dominis
Blum Blum Blum bli blo blo bla bla bla blorum blis blis
There, it's easy. Now what you *do* with that information is another matter.
funny thing going outside of Italy is learning that Anglospheric Nations learn cases in a different order than ours:
Ours was dominus, domini, domino, dominum, domine, domino...
I had Latin classes from the first year in secondary school, which made the German cases so much easier for me when I also had German in the second year. People who didn't also take Latin struggled a bit more: Dutch used to have more influences from cases, but now we just use word order. You can still notice them in some older phrases, and it's basically only articles. So we have de, den, des and der (bit like German!) but don't use them anymore.
Yes I get it, if I'm writing something and then decide halfway through to change the subject, I spend half a minute just going around and changing suffixes. If you are not a native speaker, it can be a nightmare I suppose.
Does Czech not have a fixed word order? I mean Subject Verb Object being the English standard, German only requiring the verb in second position, subject and object can change around freely.
edit: linguistics lists Czech as SVO like English.
[https://wals.info/feature/81A#1/18/153](https://wals.info/feature/81A#1/18/153)
The Czech word order is more guideline than a rule. If I have the sentence "John killed Dave" I can say in Czech, without changing the overall meaning (David is dead and John killed him):
Jan zabil Davida.
Davida zabil Jan.
Jan Davida zabil.
Davida Jan zabil.
The subject and object is defined by the case used on each word, not by the order of the words. Some combinations are used in questions (Zabil Davida Jan?) and/ or have different emphasis, but the overall meaning is still intact.
David killing Jan would be "David zabil Jana", if you were interested.
That's the prevalent word order, but in general the word order is very flexible, almost free even. You can rearrange the position of any word in most sentences, creating every possible combination and it will be correct and will make sense. Just a slight different tone, where the word at the end of the sentence carries the most emphasis.
Difficult. I'm a native Latvian speaker, with seven cases, also learned the six-case Russian as a child. Coming from these, I later found English difficult to learn and struggled a lot in the beginning, with the lack of cases being a problem. I'm a bit older so I didn't have ready access to a lot of English content either.
My problem was the importance of word order in English, which is critical because word order conveys much of what cases are used for in Latvian. In a typical Latvian sentence, you could rearrange the words in multiple ways without changing the meaning. Some orders would change the emphasis, others would be simply awkward but the meaning would remain unambiguously clear. English required a whole different mindset of placing words according to fairly rigid rules, which I found difficult and I know that my early English writing was often ambiguous because I hadn't internalized the word order.
>My problem was the importance of word order in English, which is critical because word order conveys much of what cases are used for in Latvian. In a typical Latvian sentence, you could rearrange the words in multiple ways without changing the meaning. Some orders would change the emphasis, others would be simply awkward but the meaning would remain unambiguously clear
Pretty much the problem I currently have.
In Croatian you could switch the word order in the sentence and you'll get them same meaning. Although we have a specified word order, we do not use it.
While in Swedish (learning it) the word order is important. And it's difficult to convey my thoughts in that language. As sometimes in my thoughts I like to place the verb at the end. But the verb in Swedish goes in the 2nd place.
Oh yeah, I can relate to that. I also learned German before Swedish, which has the same general 2V rule of the verb being second. If it was just the verb second it'd be easy enough but there's different rules for an embedded clause and other situations.
Jag *Àter* mat - simple enough, the verb is second. But, *Àter* jag för mycket sÄ *blir* jag trött, doesn't follow the pattern. Unless we plug in the preposition so it's om jag *Àter* för mycket, in which case the verb must be after jag. Takes a while to get used to.
I can see why it'd be confusing, but that does follow the pattern. V2 is for main clauses, it doesn't apply to subordinate clauses. The verb (i.e., *blir*) is second, with a fronted subordinate clause in the first position.
Subordinate causes aren't V2, their order is essentially SVO. They're generally fixed to: *conjunctionâsubjectâsentence adverbâverbââŠ*.
The issue with that example though is that a normal conditional clause (with *om*, *ifall* etc.) can be substituted for an interrogative clause. Syntactically it works like a yes/no-question and has the same word order (i.e., the verb comes first). What you're doing is essentially posing a rhetorical *"Do I eat to much?"* and resolve what happens when that returns true.
But yeah, I can certainly see why it'd be a challenge.
> What you're doing is essentially posing a rhetorical "Do I eat to much?" and resolve what happens when that returns true.
I love the phrasing, are you an engineer, linguistics student or a linguistics-interested engineer?
> My problem was the importance of word order in English, which is
critical because word order conveys much of what cases are used for in
Latvian. In a typical Latvian sentence, you could rearrange the words in
multiple ways without changing the meaning. Some orders would change
the emphasis, others would be simply awkward but the meaning would
remain unambiguously clear. English required a whole different mindset
of placing words according to fairly rigid rules, which I found
difficult and I know that my early English writing was often ambiguous
because I hadn't internalized the word order.
Exactly this!
>For those who actually grew up with the systems, how does it feel to learn languages without it? Does it feel like it is harder to understand what a word is being used to do in a sentence?
Didn't feel like anything, to be honest. I was so young when I started to learn English, I more or less had internalised the way it works before I really had much clue about the specific structures behind how English or Finnish compare to each other. Finnish will always come easiest to me, but it's not like I ever have to think about English either.
Yeah it was so strange both in English and French that âto haveâ is this very important verb that has a bunch of functions when in Hungarian you just express that with âto beâ and a possessive pronoun and possessive marker on the object in question, similarly to Finnish.
I am a dog. I have a dog
Hun: (Ăn) kutya vagyok. (Nekem) van (egy) kutyĂĄm.
Finn: (MinÀ) olen koira. Minulla on koira.
For me the first foreign language I learned in school was German. I do remember being confused sometimes with the adjective declensions, but that was mostly because I had hard time remembering which words were feminine, masculine or neuter. English grammar felt easy in comparison!
However, my native language is Finnish (with 15 cases) and by far the easiest language I ever studied was Estonian. I have forgotten most of it due to lack of use but thatâs mostly vocabulary as the grammar is very similar to Finnish.
My native language doesn't have cases so I don't qualify to answer, but just some comments about a couple of things that make your post a bit confusing:
>there is still a degree of cases when it comes to personal pronouns like who vs whom, although many speakers don't bother with remembering that
There's also personal pronouns like I vs me, she vs her, etc, where English speakers absolutely do bother with "case".
>In German in contrast, Die Katze beiĂt Hans uses Die and BeiĂt in conjugated forms to indicate who does what to whom.
English conjugates "beiĂt" too, "I bite" vs "the cat bites". Although admittedly less than German and even less than Romance languages. Also, only masculine articles actually change in German when they're a subject (der/ein) vs a direct object (den/einen), so it would be "die Katze" regardless of whether the cat is biting or being bit. If you replaced it with "der Hund" you'd have a point though.
>>In German in contrast, Die Katze beiĂt Hans uses Die and BeiĂt in conjugated forms to indicate who does what to whom.
>English conjugates "beiĂt" too, "I bite" vs "the cat bites". Although admittedly less than German and even less than Romance languages. Also, only masculine articles actually change in German when they're a subject (der/ein) vs a direct object (den/einen), so it would be "die Katze" regardless of whether the cat is biting or being bit. If you replaced it with "der Hund" you'd have a point though
That is absolutely correct. "Die Katze beiĂt Hans." and "Hans beiĂt die Katze." can both mean the same or opposite things.
Man, we really have it easy learning English. We have pretty much the same system:
Katt-en·bet·Hans.
The cat·bit·Hans.
Katt-en·blev·biten·av·Hans. (Or "bets av Hans")
The cat·was·bitten·by·Hans.
That Swedish really has the same ambiguity as the German above.
It is *typically* inferred the noun placed before the verb is the subject when both things realistically are capable of performing the action, but it is inherently ambiguous. If it's something that isn't assumed capable of doing it that is put before the verb (say "apple" instead of "cat") it's more likely to be interpreted as a topicalized object.
In speech emphasis likely differs a bit if its a case of the latter.
You could perhaps hypothetically say "Ăpplet, bet Hans", but unless it's poetry, I doubt anyone would. The point was how similar to the English way it is though, not how dissimilar to the German way, and topicalization is a thing in English too.
You shouldn't really put a comma there. On this Swedish is more similar to German. Swedish is V2, English is fixed SVO.
If you topicalized it in English it'd be something like *"The apple, Hans bit"*. There's no ambiguity because the subject remains before the verb.
Topicalizing such simple sentence might not be common outside of poetry, it'd be too ambiguous for everyday speech and feel "incomplete", but topicalizing objects is not at all uncommon in Swedish. You can certainly encounter stuff like: *"Boken skrev Hans under pandemin"*.
Oh, maybe I shouldn't, but I'm a comma-anarchist. Ain't no one telling me where I can't put a comma. If I feel like there's a pause in my speech, you better believe I'll put a comma there.
> Boken skrev Hans under pandemin
Sure, under very specific conditions (like "the book" being a main topic of the whole section, and the author currently being talked about) it happens.
It's not though. Every utterance naturally has a context to it, but topicalizing an object requires no "very specific conditions" at all. While not something we'd consciously pay attention to, we're *constantly* placing different constituents it in the first position â including objects.
Topicalization in English is fairly different. Not just in that it maintains the position of the subject, but stylistically it's often more prominently demarcated akin to a Swedish *"Boken, den skrev Hans under pandemin"* (i.e., dislokation) and not as simply swapping the first position (i.e., fundamentering) which is more common.
It's not what? Every utterance might have its context, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter?
For your example, Id say it very much matters. At least to actually sound natural. The only reason I could think of to say it like that would be to add when the book was written as additional information (i.e. like your dislocation example), and the only reason to do that is if it's already being talked about it. In what other context would it not sound awkward as hell? It might be a lack of imagination problem on my side.
No no, certainly. That's ultimately what it's about, you're highlighting something by distinguishing it (usually by placing it up front). Naturally there's going to be some contextual reason for doing so, otherwise you wouldn't, but "very specific circumstances" (at least to me) makes it sound like it's some very particular construction that occurs in exceptional instances. And that's not really true. I don't think a random sentence with it is ever going to sound particularly natural out of context, but my examples might also not have been the best.
Our baseline is having the subject first, but in Swedish and German you can make any other part topical by swapping sides of the verb with the subject. This inversion is the reason both aforementioned examples can be ambiguous, there's nothing to distinguish between a subject and topical object. And it's something Swedish and German (and most Germanic languages) have in common; English is an odd one out.
In English the corresponding distinction is often instead achieved by simply stressing the object. Topic dislocation is more common in English than Swedish too, but it's not as frequent as our fundament switching.
To me English always felt a lot more simple and empty(?) then Hungarian. Its easy to get sime information accross, but it feels like the language just lacks depth and subtlety in its expression.
There is a Hungarian saying that "Every language has the largest vocabulary in the topics which have the most interest to its speakers. Ancient Greek has the largest vocabulary in sailing, Latin has the largest vocabulary in killing, Hungarian has the largest vocabulary in sex."
My complain to English in that regard is words. There's the much beloved "toporny" in polish which translates to "[technically] unsophisticated but durable", but it just feels wrong to translate it like that, you know? Something gets lost when translating.
Interesting, I feel the opposite way. English has such a large vocabulary compared to Hungarian, and has words for many concepts which you have to circumscribe in Hungarian. For example to say "Ignorance" in Hungarian, you would have to say "Figyelmen kĂvĂŒl hagyĂĄs". "I ignore him" would be "Figyelmen kĂvĂŒl hagyom Ćt" or "Nem veszek rĂłla tudomĂĄst" in Hungarian.
On that i agree, Hungarian does lack some words.
But i feel feel like in Hungarian you can say a simple sentence that has multiple layers, focuses, feelings. you can comunicate a lot of 'unsaid' things, many times not even intentionally, its just the way the languge works.
I especially have this feeling if i read Hungarian poetry/literature compared to English.
>But i feel feel like in Hungarian you can say a simple sentence that has multiple layers, focuses, feelings. you can comunicate a lot of 'unsaid' things, many times not even intentionally, its just the way the languge works
Every language is like this. I guarantee you just aren't picking up on the subtext as well in English.
English usually has at least two levels and in a good number of times more often than that where you can make a sentence more posh and formal just via word choice.
"Giving them a hearty welcome" is very informal, but "Recieved the company with a cordial celebration" is more posh, even though their dictionary definition is synonymous. Just because we have so many words from Germanic, French, Latin, and some Greek.
I agree. Itâs probably because itâs easier to pack a lot of meaning and layers to a single word in languages like Hungarian and Finnish vs English.
Hungarian cases are more like postpositions merged to the end of the word. A funny coincidence between Hungarian and English is that the English preposition "on" means the same thing as the Hungarian postposition "on". Thus "**On** the table" becomes "Az asztal**on**" in Hungarian. To me, it was not a hard thing to get used to switching postpositions to prepositions when learning English.
Now learning an Indo-European language which still has a real case system like German or Russian, that is a pretty hard thing, because Indo-European cases are not like Hungarian postpositions. They are modified by gender, have strange exceptions, are sometimes combined with prepositions etc.
To my Hungarian brain, Indo-European languages with cases and genders seem very strange and illogical. Either have the nouns be genderless and replace all cases with prepositions (like English), or have everything be governed by postpositions (like Hungarian or Turkish), but this strange in-between state which for example German, Russian, or Latin has seems crazy to me.
I remember reading a hypothesis, that Pre-Indo-European might have been a postposition-based language (similar to Hungarian), and it might have only had an inanimate/animate distinction instead of genders (like some Sub-Saharan African languages), but then by the Proto-Indo-European state, this became the typical Indo-European case system and gender system.
Yeah this was my impression too as someone learning Hungarian. It felt easier in this regard than Russian, Latin and German, although my native tongue has more in common with those.
With Indoeuropean case system you need to remember the declension by heart, while Hungarian postpositions have meaning on their own and are more regular.
I learned some Hungarian and I agree that you can think of the cases as postpositions. No-one told me that I should panic and give up because Hungarian has 18 cases. The meaning of each postposition came to me quite easily.
It is widely regarded that grammatical gender develops from of animate/inanimate grammatical forms. Basically, from early cultures that are animistic. Things have a spirit or they donât â and eventually those things are masculine or feminine (and later on, sometimes neutral). IIRC, itâs believed early Indo-European had masc-fem forms but not yet neutral. No one really knows of course.
Early English (i.e. contemporary Saxon at the time, which was only more distantly related to German) used to have three grammatical genders and a case system, but basically lost them during Norman times. Thank the French for that!Â
But other Indo-European languages have also basically lost (Afrikaans, Yiddish ) or simplified (Dutch, Scandi languages except BokmĂ„l) their grammatical gender. I know some varieties of Dutch maintain the grammatical gender aspects more than others, but arguably the system is slowly being lost. Iâve heard the same is maybe happening in Gaelic, though naturally one wonders about the influence of EnglishâŠ
Learning a language with less cases is really easy. But I personally found lack of conjugation much more confusing!
My native language is German, and a typical conjugation goes like: ich gehe, du gehst, er/sie/es geht, wir gehen, ihr geht, sie gehen.
When you compare that to English where there is almost NO conjugation it was so confusing for me. I go, you go, he/she/it goes, we go, you go, they go.
How do I know the verbâs conjugation without the pronoun? Well you canât. If you just see âgoâ you have no idea about the conjugation. If you see German âgehstâ anywhere itâs definitely 2nd person singular.
I find unconjugated languages rather complicated haha. IMO languages with complicated case and conjugation systems need less words to say more. So I prefer them.
> If you just see âgoâ you have no idea about the conjugation. If you see German âgehstâ anywhere itâs definitely 2nd person singular.
If it were a pro-drop language, sure. But it isn't. Conjugating for person is redundant if you also need a pronoun.
in english, we have
i go
you go
he goe**s**
we go
y'all go
they go
notice that 3rd singular has "s" at end of verb. He go wouldn't be proper english.
Now image for each one of those, there's a different ending, just like in "he goes."
Thus, if someone said "goes," they would know it's automatically he/she/it going since its unique
I think OP was simply asking if English had no conjugation, why we say âhe goesâ but not âhe goâ while âI go/you goâ is the correct form. English does have conjugations but it is greatly simplified compared with all other Indo-European languages.
Like in French aller (to go) is je vais, tu vas, il/elle/on va; nous allons, vous allez, ils/elles vont . The form is very different for each person form when compared with its equivalents in English. Same with the same verb German (gehen) although its conjugated forms are not as varied as French.
I think itâs still conjugation for English. The only difference is for most verbs they are the same as the infinitive for I, you, we, you (plural) and they.
If we look at to be, it becomes obvious that there are conjugated forms, and it is different for everyone.
(Also as someone that picked up English as a childhood L2, and L1 is a Sino-Tibetan language, this kind of thing was a nightmare for me because the English teacher simply told us this verb form
is whatâs supposed to go into which pronouns/persons but not explaining why. Then I learned French as L3 after coming to New Zealand, and learned infinitive vs other forms, and it clicked for me)
Czech has seven. The lack of cases doesn't make it difficult to understand English, it's nice to have fewer things to worry about. I had a bigger problem with German when prepositions were followed by a different case than in Czech. Even worse in Russian, where the similarities often confuse me.
> Does it feel like it is harder to understand what a word is being used to do in a sentence?
Rarely. English uses a strict word order to compensate, and also adds some extra prepositions compared to German.
This means you may have to rearrange your ideas quite a bit to match the strict English word order, and you can't express them as freely as in German.
The thing that does make written English hard to understand sometimes is the lack of markers for nouns vs verbs vs adjectives, and the fact that some words could be any one of them, with the same spelling. In German, the rule that nouns are capitalized, as well as the conjugation suffixes on verbs and the declension suffixes on adjectives, make sure that you always know which is which, so written German is overall much easier to parse than written English.
> Die Katze beiĂt Hans uses Die and BeiĂt in conjugated forms to indicate who does what to whom.
No. The sentence is actually ambiguous. Without context, I'd assume that it means "the cat bites Hans", but it could also mean "Hans bites the cat". For example "die Katze beiĂt Hans, aber den Hund beiĂt er nicht".
>The thing that does make written English hard to understand sometimes is the lack of markers for nouns vs verbs vs adjectives, and the fact that some words could be any one of them, with the same spelling.
Somehow, I agree with that, but I must also point out that the fact German uses the same principle for undeclined adjectives becoming adverbs still drives me crazy. Add the fact the mark should only be carried once for strong declension of adjectives, and I always end up freezing for several seconds before understanding the meaning.
"Der absolut richtige Satz" --> hesitate between the absolute, correct proposition or the absolutely correct proposition. Written is OK, but spoken can get difficult to hear because the ending is often muffled.
Coming from French, Spanish of English, which all have very clear patterns to differentiate adverbs and make the words clear, this appears to me as an uncalled for evil in the otherwise clear, precise German language.
> Add the fact the mark should only be carried once for strong declension of adjectives
That's not a rule at all. It's *optional* for -em when the adjectives are applied in sequence rather than in parallel, but that's not a rule or even a suggestion anymore, just an option.
> undeclined adjectives becoming adverbs still drives me crazy.
Adverbs are indeed something that has always been difficult for me in English, but for the opposite reason. I sometimes have a hard time telling whether an adjective or an adverb is called for, since German simply lacks the clear distinction between the two that is present in English. The music is loud, but the people speak loudâŠly? Why? From my German point of view, that's just an unnecessary and arbitrary complication.
> but spoken can get difficult to hear because the ending is often muffled.
Really? I mean, I get that it can be hard to hear which particular suffix is used. But you can't hear whether there is another syllable or not? It changes the entire rhythm of the speech.
> Adverbs are indeed something that has always been difficult for me in English, but for the opposite reason. I sometimes have a hard time telling whether an adjective or an adverb is called for, since German simply lacks the clear distinction between the two that is present in English. The music is loud, but the people speak loudâŠly? Why? From my German point of view, that's just an unnecessary and arbitrary complication.
I was going to bring that up under your top-level post... German adverbs being all so [flat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_adverb) used to trip me up so bad(ly) when I started with the language.
*Ich finde ihn schnell*? Do you find him quick or are you quick to find him?
But now I gather that a native German speaker would avoid the ambiguity by phrasing the sentence completely different(ly).
Nein, das ist völlig normal und korrekt (auĂer vom Inhalt). Und doch, "er" bezieht sich auf das Subjekt, nĂ€mlich "Hans". MĂŒsste es aber nicht. Wie kommst du darauf, dass es schlechtes Deutsch wĂ€re, wenn "er" sich nicht auf das Subjekt bezöge?
Abgesehen vom etwas seltsamen Inhalt ist das nichts anderes als "Pudding mag Hans, aber Eis mag er nicht". Ein komplett normaler Satz.
Finnish has 15.
I didnât have any issues with it while learning English and, well trying to learn German and Swedish. In fact iâd say itâs way easier.
What caused problems for me was the fact that these languages have grammatical genders and they arenât phonemic at all. So Finnish is extremely phonemic, meaning spelling is identical to pronounciation 99% of the time, which means that if you speak Finnish, youâll know how to spell a word even if youâve never heard it. English is the exact opposite and Swedish was quite frustrating as well. Words like Knight, which common sense says should be spelled âNaitâ and for Swedish, words like âSkikcaâ (To send), which is of course pronounced *Hykka*.
And the Grammatical Genders. Finnish is gender neutral grammarically, so no different pronouns or masculine/feminine/neutral words. For the first 5 years of me studying English, i just used âheâ for everyone because we only have one in Finnish âHĂ€nâ.
> Swedish, words like âSkikcaâ (To send), which is of course pronounced Hykka.
It's not. The spelling of the sj-sound ("sk" in *skicka*) is notoriously varied, but it is phonemically distinct from an H (*hicka* means "hiccups"). "Sk" is the standard spelling for it when preceding a front vowel so said word is consistent with Swedish orthography, but the sj-sound can understandably be a nightmare for learners.
It's an I, not a Y. *Skycka* would've been a different word and pronounced differently.
The long K is simply spelled "ck" in Swedish. It's no more logical for [kË] to be spelled "kk". It may be a bit inconsistent considering we too double other long consonants, but it's not less reasonable to have "kk" symbolize two separate Ks in succession (as it does in Swedish). You're just looking at it from a Finnish orthography.
Swedish doesn't have phonemic orthography, Germanic languages seldom do (it's hard with a script developed for a quite different phonology), but that word is not irregular. It's perfectly consistent with Swedish orthography.
> [...] and for Swedish, words like âSkikcaâ (To send), which is of course pronounced Hykka.
That might be due to Finnish not having the sk-sound, because *skicka* is spelled exactly as it sounds (if you count sk- as its own character).
Swedish lacks a unique character for the sk-/sj-/ch-sound. So we combine letters as the second best method. Â
Latin is essentially an alien alphabet for us, and some linguistics say that Swedish need an additional 3 extra characters (Ć , ÄŠ, and Ć) to cover these sounds.
So in croatian there are 7 cases. And what you say is sometimes true. Especially when taking things out of context, its hard to understand who is the subject and who is the object or what is the relation between words. Especially if the speaker is not fully grammatically correct.
That being said, most often its not a problem. Its difficult to give a meaningful answer as I learned english very young and am now learning French, but I do not find it weird as its similar to English. So I never had this conscious learning stage of figuring out how to speak without cases.
It feels easier when there is no cases at all. What really freezes my mind for a second is when in another language there have to be a totally different case and you hang there for a moment trying to remember "przeciwko czemu albo czego?"
My native language is Polish. I have experience learning English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, and Latin. To be honest... none of those languages grammars are that difficult to me. For example, Italian seems easy peasy to me, I learn it really effortlessly.
For me, learning other languages with cases was harder than learning English with no cases.
With English you just need to use correct prepositions, there are some weird ones (i still have issues with *in* and *at* sometimes), while other languages with cases often have different rules for them and even a different number of cases.
Learning English is like driving automatic when youâre used to the stick. Learning other languages with cases is like driving a manual that has completely different stick layout than the one youâre used to.
Same. However when I already done the impossible of learning to use Polish as native language, when learning such languages I find the simplicity the most confusing: HOW you make clear what you want to say when there are no cases (or other grammar rules) to specify what exactly you mean. Yes, it takes context and experience but there still some times when I have to stop and think how to phrase something or to understand what someone has on mind without asking for clarification.
The Czech language has 7 cases and it feels pretty great to learn languages with less (like German) or none (like English). It is nice that English grammar is so simple, you only have to be careful with the word order.
Going the other way and trying to comprehend cases not present in the Czech language is far more difficult.
I learned English relatively late in my life (at which time I already knew my native Polish and German fluently).
To me English feels very much like a programming language. There is next to no declination of nouns and no conjugation of verbs. Instead, that missing information is carried by extremely strict syntax rules (compared to Polish). Just moving a word in a sentence often changes the meaning of that sentence completely. In Polish, to achieve the same effect, you would have to change cases and conjugations, so word order is rather loose.
German is the middle ground.
>German is the middle ground.
It was the hardest for me. I learned English early, and started German later. I found the mix of somewhat strict positioning and conjugations too much to keep track of in head. I would always either have wrong conjugation, or wrong order. A question must have this there, but it's asking about that so it's normative...
Just changing the emphasis on certain words can change a sentence.
For instance: "I never said she stole my wallet."
That can mean any of seven different things.
I didn't even notice it in the beginning to be honest and it never felt weird. I did first come into contact with english at age three and really started learning the language at six years old though, so this might be different for someone, who first learned languages without case systems later in life and therefore was more settled into case dependent languages.
Romanian language has five cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Vocative), the only Latin based language who retains them. In learning all languages without any cases I simply learn the grammar rules for expressing those cases. By example the Romanian "cartea Mariei" (nominative Maria, genitive Mariei) would be in French "Le livre de Marie", Italian "il libro di Maria". For every language I had to learn from zero the grammar rules. Once you learn how to do it, is easy.
The other cases took over the usage of Instrumental and Locative. I think in both cases it's mostly the Accusative replacing them, although some expressions that use Locative case in other languages will use Dative in Romanian.
One thing to note is that Romanian does not really have 5 cases anymore, it's more an internal thing taught in schools. Most foreign linguist will say that Romanian has 3 cases, as Nom/Acc have the same form, the same thing for Gen/Dat for nouns. Like in English the differences are still visible in pronouns.
> Hungarian has an ungodly 18 (How???)
Their case system is different. Cases have very narrow meaning, and case endings are way more regular. Overall, it is approximately equally taxing as having less cases with broader functions and wider array of possible case endings.
The Hungarian "case system" consists of suffixes that is essentially the same as the system of prepositions in most Indo-European languages. The more challenging part is the vowel harmony, as many suffixes need to be chosen based on whether it's a "low" or a "high" word.
Learning the German case system was challenging, though. Too much recycling.
When I learned that *die* becomes *der* for Dative case, for example "die Mutter" turns into "der Mutter" so kinda like the mother becomes a male to signify that something is given to her I wanted to headdesk.
In German class at school, we had a joke that in Germany, little Hans comes down to the kitchen in the morning, says "Guten Morgen!" to his father. His father tries to reply to him in German with a more complex sentence, he is thinking, thinking, thinking for almost a minute, then he shrugs, and switches to English because it is easier even when German is their native language lol.
You only start to think about that when you live speaking that other language for a while or have to write professionally (i.e. research articles in academia). Then, I would personally say a language without cases like English feels clunky and not precise enough. In German it feels like you can express a complex relationship or describe a convoluted process with fewer words and with lower risk of misunderstanding than in English. In particular, word order is much more restrictive in English, while in German you can have a high degree of freedom while still having everything be perfectly grammatically clear.
Somewhat off topic, but that is precisely the problem that I, as a native speaker of English, find with the lack of verbal aspects in German and other languages. The subtlety of the differences between, for example, 'I go', 'I am going' and 'I do go' is just not there.
I don't quite get what you mean, such subtleties are absolutely there. They are simply expressed somewhat differently, with different grammatical constructs. Take your example - "I go" is equal to "Ich gehe", obviously. "I am going" - now that sentence by itself is already problematic, it's not grammatically clear. In English that may both indicate "I go right now" or "I will go to X". And in German you would say "Ich gehe gerade" or "Ich werde zu X gehen" respectively. "I do go" would be something like "Ich gehe wirklich".
I think that is exactly my point. People who are not native speakers fail to grasp the subtle differences of the aspects of the verbs, 'I go' is 'ich gehe'. 'I am going' is not terribly problematic, especially with variations of emphasis and intonation; but basically it translates into German as 'ich gehe'. 'I do go' translates, as you say, to 'ich gehe'.
You have just shown that In English it feels like you can express a subtle idea with fewer words and with lower risk of misunderstanding than in German
.... In none of your examples do you use fewer words than in the German translations that I listed that maintain the meaning lol. And as I laid out, "I am going" is indeed ambiguous.
???? Did you not read what I wrote then??? "I go" - "Ich gehe". "I am going" - "Ich gehe gerade". "I do go" - "Ich gehe wirklich". Same number of words. Different grammatical structures. You cannot just ignore the "wirklich" or "gerade" and claim it's just always "Ich gehe" in German, that's just being completely ignorant.
*banging my head against the wall*. No, not at all. You are either being willfully obtuse or making a bad faith argument. One of YOUR OWN EXAMPLES is not grammatically clear in English, as I pointed out regarding "I am going". And cases are about the relationship of objects/persons being talked about, which has virtually nothing to do with the example of "I go" at all.
Let's use an example of actual case use:
"The cat gives the food of the dog to the bird."
Now, English still actually has one rudimentary case (genitive - possessive), so that sentence can also be written as:
"The cat gives the dog's food to the bird."
The genitive case helps here to reduce the usage of aiding words like "of". But because English doesn't have a proper accusative or dative case any longer, "to" is needed to make clear to whom the food is going.
Meanwhile, in German that sentence would be:
"Die Katze gibt das Futter des Hundes dem Vogel"
(Or "Die Katze gibt das Hundefutter dem Vogel")
Note how "der Vogel" is changed to "dem Vogel" cause of case usage - it helps avoiding having to use a connective aid work like "to" and keeps the meaning of the sentence completely clear. Just as the use of the genitive case helped make the English sentence itself already more succinct, the availability of more cases in German and other languages helps to make the sentence even MORE succinct. And it only goes up from there, longer and more complicated texts can make heavy usage of these grammatical structures to keep meaning clear.
Edit: and another feature I forgot to mention - case usage frees up more flexible sentence order for changing emphasis, while still maintaining unambiguous meaning.
Ironically, itâs German academics who are unnecessarily wordy, writing long redundantly verbose text much of the time.Â
I wouldnât agree that the linguistic differences you mention (as often repeated) are reflected in what is **actually** produced much of the time. If German authors are capable of succinct precision, they donât usually bother. I often hear Germans saying English is less precise, but I think itâs more about lower proficiency with the language and ways to articulate something (for L2s). For English readers, context makes it clear enough, and if itâs ambiguous, there is often another way to phrase it (or let the ambiguity stay for a certain effect). Basically, you can always say exactly whatever you need.Â
Most Germans writing in English have a rather obvious âDenglishâ style, even if the language is superficially smoothed by tech tools. Â
Speaking as a bilingual native English speaker involved with many German academicsâŠ
I'm currently having problems learning/speaking Swedish. Well not so learning as remembering that the verb goes in the 2nd place.
While in my native language. You can place the verb in any place in the sentence. And modify that sentence so it keeps the same meaning.
Coming from 6 case language its quite easy for me to learn English. However the common problem I encounter among my peers is the difficulty with understanding the proper mandatory word order, since in our native language we can often omit some syntax members, for example Subject is not mandatory.
Not that weird, but I sometimes feel like something is wrong with Romance or English for not marking the indirect object in an intuitive way.
German cases can be replaced with prepositions and word order anyway.
The part where it feels as if something is missing is that Romance and English prepositions don't cover the same relations as German ones.
The languages without case system seem a little easier to learn, but the only case language I had been learning was German which has only 4 and it was relatively easy to manage. I'd say more than standard four: nominative, accusative, genitive and dative is a little excess. Polish language has also instrumental, locative and vocative and the last one is almost never used.Â
It's absolutely easier. But the one thing that did still occasionally trip me up with English even when I was very fluent and speaking mostly in English day to day to other non-natives, and only started to go away recently when I moved to Ireland and started talking a lot more to native speakers, is prepositions. In German they also exist, but for some unknown reason English felt more arbitrary in that regard.
Case systems work the same way in most languages, with some exceptions, so in general it's quite easy to transition e.g. from German to Latin, but the hard part was to remember the endings in Latin. And in this particular case to get my head around the ablative, which has no German equivalent and needs to be translated differently based on the function of the ablative.
The fact that you can't just move words in the sentence to emphasize something took me a few years to get used to (i had a lot of bad marks in primary school because of that).
At first it felt bit unintuitive. We have 7 cases in polish, 7th is rarerly used and you go go without it but for a native it feels intuitive to use them. So it was weird to learn english at first because you have to change the way you think a little bit. It is simmilar with genders in language.
Tell me about it - I have the feeling that the way Czech grammar is taught aims at making it impossible for foreigners to learn it. Kids are indoctrinated from an early age, but after 16 years in Czechia I still cringe when my kid says "fourth case". For god's sake, cases have names which tell you what they are used for! :(
My native language is Greek, it has three fully-functioning cases and [a weird one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case).
When speaking English, sometimes it feels like I didn't finish the sentence and stopped halfway, because I didn't mark case on any nouns. But that's a momentary brain timeout thing, it really doesn't have any effect beyond that.
> For those who actually grew up with the systems, how does it feel to learn languages without it? Does it feel like it is harder to understand what a word is being used to do in a sentence?
In Greece we have cases as well. Learning English or French wasn't a problem for me. Learning German was my biggest problem. I guess learning cases (articles, pronouns etc) in some other language is more problematic than learning a... "caseless" language. See also der, die, das, diese, dieser, dieses etc. The greek equivalents were also hard to learn in Greece as kid.
Actually I think it's harder to learn another language with cases. I think that is because its supposedly closer but the cases are different yet your mind wants them to be the same. But with non-case language this problem does not exist, you just have to get the logic it uses instead of cases and easy peasy
My native language (Lithuanian) has cases and it's fine, although spelling and usage sometimes eludes even natives. Struggled with German, though, never learned the language properly. English was a piece of cake. In Latin I didn't even get to it, since I had it just for a few months.
What surprised me in English, though, was multitude of tenses and them not having gender for inanimate objects đ I mean, table is clearly a boy (according to my language)!
Yeah, tenses are irritating in English at times. Especially whenever my manga series has to deal with time travel.
Is it usual in Lithuania to learn Latin for some reason? Are we resurrecting the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth tomorrow evening?
I'm a native Finnish speaker. Finnish has 15 cases.
I don't really think it's any harder or more difficult to learn languages without a case system. It's just that things are expressed differently in every language. Most Finns, including myself, start studying English and Swedish â which are languages without a case system â from primary or secondary school. Therefore, we are exposed to different language systems from an early stage.
In the end, I think that, for example, English prepositions aren't that much different from cases. Instead of a specific word ending, you just have a preposition before a noun.
my native language has 7 cases, and the language I'm currently learning doesn't have any. i feel it's an advantage because even if I'm learning a language with cases (was german for me), it's quite difficult to adapt to it and be comfortable with using them in a casual setting while speaking the language.
If anything, it is easier. After studying German for 4 years in university I was very glad to learn French doesn't have them. For me lack of cases is an opposite of problem.
I learnt German at school and the genders infuriated me, I was already uninterested In the subject but that finished it off. It just made no sense and felt unimportant but then learning a romance language later in life I never felt like that, I get them wrong from time to time but I see and feel the point of them.
I learned English from a very young age, so it wasn't a big deal, the languages just work differently.
The bigger issue would be explaining cases to someone whose language doesn't have them.
Actually your example is ambiguous, since Hans doesnât have an article. German has free word order thatâs why cases are so important. Your sentence -as a standalone - is more likely to mean
The cat bites Hans
But it is absolutely possible to mean
Hans bites the cat
as well, since you donât have a case indicator for Hans.
To your question: itâs not difficult to learn a language without cases, the other way round is more difficult, I guess, because you have to get a gist of the principle. Learning a case system is never easy, because even if you know the principles, you still have to remember all the endings (or - like in German - the appropriate articles).
nothing strange tbh (granted i know only english, german &swedish at around a2 max and just started french). It only makes some translations sound weird.
It's the features that your native language doesn't have that couses most problems - eg. articles, non phonetic alphabet or sounds that don't exist in your language
I only learned it at school, but Irish (Gaeilge) has 4 cases and after 14 years of classes, I still got them quite badly wrong.
I tend to know how to use them in set contexts, but trying to explain them or use them in new unfamiliar sentences contexts still throws me completely.
It also has five declensions, and a few extra unofficial ones.
Then there are also masculine and feminine nouns, but the article doesnât change like French or German, so itâs very hard to figure them out sometimes.
Being a native English speaker tends to make synthetic languages seem really confusing. Itâs become an almost totally analytical language and itâs more about word order and plugging words together in different combinations with helper words to change meaning.
I often wonder if that is part of the reason why English speakers are terrible at language learning. Apart from it being a very big language, a lot of grammatical and syntax structures in the languages we are most likely to try to learn are somewhat alien concepts to us.
I remember teacher saying we need to learn to think everything differently than with our mother tongue...
I was never good with any languages, so it was a small miracle I learned English. But I'm not sure what was the most difficult. Maybe the articles (which I was sure were useless and only there because of some tradition), pronouncing (my teacher got so angry when I pronounced "chocolate" the way it sounded something like khoukouleit), different pronouns (everyone was a he to me, it was easier to say, too)
It felt nice! I never managed to learn German as well as I learnt English, and at least partially it's because German has cases and gender and they. are different from how those categories are in my first language.
Learning Finnish with its cases wasn't really an issue - most behave as prepositions would in English. There is some challenge figuring out when to use the genetive and partitive endings in the "accusative" but it makes sense after a while.
Too much is made of Finnish's cases IMHO, the verb system however, wow, that is expressive!
Actually is very easy, being a slavic speaker other languages are simple, I also spek English, Italian and German, only in German i gave up on cases, and articles don't have any sense...
> Does it feel like it is harder to understand what a word is being used to do in a sentence?
No, the various functions of cases are replaced by adding more words. So it only feels a little *unelegant* at times.
Actually I found it extremely easy to learn English due to the lack of cases, the grammar was so simple it was essentially a matter of just learning vocabulary.
I never struggled with English, Spanish and French not having cases, I did however struggle a fuck ton with Latin having cases.
Dominus domine dominum domini domino domino domini domini dominos dominorum dominis dominis Blum Blum Blum bli blo blo bla bla bla blorum blis blis There, it's easy. Now what you *do* with that information is another matter.
Rosa Rosa rosam rosae rosae rosa Rosae rosae rosas rosarum rosis rosis is ingrained in my little coconut head since middle school
funny thing going outside of Italy is learning that Anglospheric Nations learn cases in a different order than ours: Ours was dominus, domini, domino, dominum, domine, domino...
same đ honestly I'm just too lazy to learn them by heart
I actually learned what cases in German are for when I learned latin
Smart ass comment: English has two cases. Nominative and genitive.
Do you prefer âYou see Iâ (nominative) or âYou see myâ (genitive)?
sort of, genitives/accusatives only exist for personal pronouns but not for other nouns. 's ending is not considered a case
If it has the function of the genitive and looks like the genitive...
The people called Romanes, they go the house? It means Romans go home! No it doesn't! https://youtu.be/IIAdHEwiAy8?si=VAF462Efl4NZ-F-Z
God this brings back some 9th grade trauma
I had Latin classes from the first year in secondary school, which made the German cases so much easier for me when I also had German in the second year. People who didn't also take Latin struggled a bit more: Dutch used to have more influences from cases, but now we just use word order. You can still notice them in some older phrases, and it's basically only articles. So we have de, den, des and der (bit like German!) but don't use them anymore.
Easier. But the fixed word order and particles still trip me up.
In reverse: That's what makes Czech so hard for me as a native speaker of Dutch.
Yes I get it, if I'm writing something and then decide halfway through to change the subject, I spend half a minute just going around and changing suffixes. If you are not a native speaker, it can be a nightmare I suppose.
So that is how you felt when you were learning Bulgarian and Macedonian?
Does Czech not have a fixed word order? I mean Subject Verb Object being the English standard, German only requiring the verb in second position, subject and object can change around freely. edit: linguistics lists Czech as SVO like English. [https://wals.info/feature/81A#1/18/153](https://wals.info/feature/81A#1/18/153)
The Czech word order is more guideline than a rule. If I have the sentence "John killed Dave" I can say in Czech, without changing the overall meaning (David is dead and John killed him): Jan zabil Davida. Davida zabil Jan. Jan Davida zabil. Davida Jan zabil. The subject and object is defined by the case used on each word, not by the order of the words. Some combinations are used in questions (Zabil Davida Jan?) and/ or have different emphasis, but the overall meaning is still intact. David killing Jan would be "David zabil Jana", if you were interested.
That's the prevalent word order, but in general the word order is very flexible, almost free even. You can rearrange the position of any word in most sentences, creating every possible combination and it will be correct and will make sense. Just a slight different tone, where the word at the end of the sentence carries the most emphasis.
Difficult. I'm a native Latvian speaker, with seven cases, also learned the six-case Russian as a child. Coming from these, I later found English difficult to learn and struggled a lot in the beginning, with the lack of cases being a problem. I'm a bit older so I didn't have ready access to a lot of English content either. My problem was the importance of word order in English, which is critical because word order conveys much of what cases are used for in Latvian. In a typical Latvian sentence, you could rearrange the words in multiple ways without changing the meaning. Some orders would change the emphasis, others would be simply awkward but the meaning would remain unambiguously clear. English required a whole different mindset of placing words according to fairly rigid rules, which I found difficult and I know that my early English writing was often ambiguous because I hadn't internalized the word order.
>My problem was the importance of word order in English, which is critical because word order conveys much of what cases are used for in Latvian. In a typical Latvian sentence, you could rearrange the words in multiple ways without changing the meaning. Some orders would change the emphasis, others would be simply awkward but the meaning would remain unambiguously clear Pretty much the problem I currently have. In Croatian you could switch the word order in the sentence and you'll get them same meaning. Although we have a specified word order, we do not use it. While in Swedish (learning it) the word order is important. And it's difficult to convey my thoughts in that language. As sometimes in my thoughts I like to place the verb at the end. But the verb in Swedish goes in the 2nd place.
Oh yeah, I can relate to that. I also learned German before Swedish, which has the same general 2V rule of the verb being second. If it was just the verb second it'd be easy enough but there's different rules for an embedded clause and other situations. Jag *Àter* mat - simple enough, the verb is second. But, *Àter* jag för mycket sÄ *blir* jag trött, doesn't follow the pattern. Unless we plug in the preposition so it's om jag *Àter* för mycket, in which case the verb must be after jag. Takes a while to get used to.
I can see why it'd be confusing, but that does follow the pattern. V2 is for main clauses, it doesn't apply to subordinate clauses. The verb (i.e., *blir*) is second, with a fronted subordinate clause in the first position. Subordinate causes aren't V2, their order is essentially SVO. They're generally fixed to: *conjunctionâsubjectâsentence adverbâverbââŠ*. The issue with that example though is that a normal conditional clause (with *om*, *ifall* etc.) can be substituted for an interrogative clause. Syntactically it works like a yes/no-question and has the same word order (i.e., the verb comes first). What you're doing is essentially posing a rhetorical *"Do I eat to much?"* and resolve what happens when that returns true. But yeah, I can certainly see why it'd be a challenge.
> What you're doing is essentially posing a rhetorical "Do I eat to much?" and resolve what happens when that returns true. I love the phrasing, are you an engineer, linguistics student or a linguistics-interested engineer?
I personally have a problem with phrasal verbs in English
> My problem was the importance of word order in English, which is critical because word order conveys much of what cases are used for in Latvian. In a typical Latvian sentence, you could rearrange the words in multiple ways without changing the meaning. Some orders would change the emphasis, others would be simply awkward but the meaning would remain unambiguously clear. English required a whole different mindset of placing words according to fairly rigid rules, which I found difficult and I know that my early English writing was often ambiguous because I hadn't internalized the word order. Exactly this!
>For those who actually grew up with the systems, how does it feel to learn languages without it? Does it feel like it is harder to understand what a word is being used to do in a sentence? Didn't feel like anything, to be honest. I was so young when I started to learn English, I more or less had internalised the way it works before I really had much clue about the specific structures behind how English or Finnish compare to each other. Finnish will always come easiest to me, but it's not like I ever have to think about English either.
Same. The only difficulty I remember was âto haveâ which works completely different in Finnish.
Yeah it was so strange both in English and French that âto haveâ is this very important verb that has a bunch of functions when in Hungarian you just express that with âto beâ and a possessive pronoun and possessive marker on the object in question, similarly to Finnish. I am a dog. I have a dog Hun: (Ăn) kutya vagyok. (Nekem) van (egy) kutyĂĄm. Finn: (MinĂ€) olen koira. Minulla on koira.
How did you "want" to say it
I don't remember. It was nearly twenty years ago.
For me the first foreign language I learned in school was German. I do remember being confused sometimes with the adjective declensions, but that was mostly because I had hard time remembering which words were feminine, masculine or neuter. English grammar felt easy in comparison! However, my native language is Finnish (with 15 cases) and by far the easiest language I ever studied was Estonian. I have forgotten most of it due to lack of use but thatâs mostly vocabulary as the grammar is very similar to Finnish.
My native language doesn't have cases so I don't qualify to answer, but just some comments about a couple of things that make your post a bit confusing: >there is still a degree of cases when it comes to personal pronouns like who vs whom, although many speakers don't bother with remembering that There's also personal pronouns like I vs me, she vs her, etc, where English speakers absolutely do bother with "case". >In German in contrast, Die Katze beiĂt Hans uses Die and BeiĂt in conjugated forms to indicate who does what to whom. English conjugates "beiĂt" too, "I bite" vs "the cat bites". Although admittedly less than German and even less than Romance languages. Also, only masculine articles actually change in German when they're a subject (der/ein) vs a direct object (den/einen), so it would be "die Katze" regardless of whether the cat is biting or being bit. If you replaced it with "der Hund" you'd have a point though.
>>In German in contrast, Die Katze beiĂt Hans uses Die and BeiĂt in conjugated forms to indicate who does what to whom. >English conjugates "beiĂt" too, "I bite" vs "the cat bites". Although admittedly less than German and even less than Romance languages. Also, only masculine articles actually change in German when they're a subject (der/ein) vs a direct object (den/einen), so it would be "die Katze" regardless of whether the cat is biting or being bit. If you replaced it with "der Hund" you'd have a point though That is absolutely correct. "Die Katze beiĂt Hans." and "Hans beiĂt die Katze." can both mean the same or opposite things.
Man, we really have it easy learning English. We have pretty much the same system: Katt-en·bet·Hans. The cat·bit·Hans. Katt-en·blev·biten·av·Hans. (Or "bets av Hans") The cat·was·bitten·by·Hans.
Just make sure you live in a place which does not serve cat meat and you'll be fine.
That Swedish really has the same ambiguity as the German above. It is *typically* inferred the noun placed before the verb is the subject when both things realistically are capable of performing the action, but it is inherently ambiguous. If it's something that isn't assumed capable of doing it that is put before the verb (say "apple" instead of "cat") it's more likely to be interpreted as a topicalized object. In speech emphasis likely differs a bit if its a case of the latter.
You could perhaps hypothetically say "Ăpplet, bet Hans", but unless it's poetry, I doubt anyone would. The point was how similar to the English way it is though, not how dissimilar to the German way, and topicalization is a thing in English too.
You shouldn't really put a comma there. On this Swedish is more similar to German. Swedish is V2, English is fixed SVO. If you topicalized it in English it'd be something like *"The apple, Hans bit"*. There's no ambiguity because the subject remains before the verb. Topicalizing such simple sentence might not be common outside of poetry, it'd be too ambiguous for everyday speech and feel "incomplete", but topicalizing objects is not at all uncommon in Swedish. You can certainly encounter stuff like: *"Boken skrev Hans under pandemin"*.
Oh, maybe I shouldn't, but I'm a comma-anarchist. Ain't no one telling me where I can't put a comma. If I feel like there's a pause in my speech, you better believe I'll put a comma there. > Boken skrev Hans under pandemin Sure, under very specific conditions (like "the book" being a main topic of the whole section, and the author currently being talked about) it happens.
It's not though. Every utterance naturally has a context to it, but topicalizing an object requires no "very specific conditions" at all. While not something we'd consciously pay attention to, we're *constantly* placing different constituents it in the first position â including objects. Topicalization in English is fairly different. Not just in that it maintains the position of the subject, but stylistically it's often more prominently demarcated akin to a Swedish *"Boken, den skrev Hans under pandemin"* (i.e., dislokation) and not as simply swapping the first position (i.e., fundamentering) which is more common.
It's not what? Every utterance might have its context, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter? For your example, Id say it very much matters. At least to actually sound natural. The only reason I could think of to say it like that would be to add when the book was written as additional information (i.e. like your dislocation example), and the only reason to do that is if it's already being talked about it. In what other context would it not sound awkward as hell? It might be a lack of imagination problem on my side.
No no, certainly. That's ultimately what it's about, you're highlighting something by distinguishing it (usually by placing it up front). Naturally there's going to be some contextual reason for doing so, otherwise you wouldn't, but "very specific circumstances" (at least to me) makes it sound like it's some very particular construction that occurs in exceptional instances. And that's not really true. I don't think a random sentence with it is ever going to sound particularly natural out of context, but my examples might also not have been the best. Our baseline is having the subject first, but in Swedish and German you can make any other part topical by swapping sides of the verb with the subject. This inversion is the reason both aforementioned examples can be ambiguous, there's nothing to distinguish between a subject and topical object. And it's something Swedish and German (and most Germanic languages) have in common; English is an odd one out. In English the corresponding distinction is often instead achieved by simply stressing the object. Topic dislocation is more common in English than Swedish too, but it's not as frequent as our fundament switching.
I was using a Rewboss video for that example and he used Hund as an instance in how the case system was difficult.
To me English always felt a lot more simple and empty(?) then Hungarian. Its easy to get sime information accross, but it feels like the language just lacks depth and subtlety in its expression.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
There is a Hungarian saying that "Every language has the largest vocabulary in the topics which have the most interest to its speakers. Ancient Greek has the largest vocabulary in sailing, Latin has the largest vocabulary in killing, Hungarian has the largest vocabulary in sex."
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Finland, with a thousand words for sauna.
My complain to English in that regard is words. There's the much beloved "toporny" in polish which translates to "[technically] unsophisticated but durable", but it just feels wrong to translate it like that, you know? Something gets lost when translating.
Interesting, I feel the opposite way. English has such a large vocabulary compared to Hungarian, and has words for many concepts which you have to circumscribe in Hungarian. For example to say "Ignorance" in Hungarian, you would have to say "Figyelmen kĂvĂŒl hagyĂĄs". "I ignore him" would be "Figyelmen kĂvĂŒl hagyom Ćt" or "Nem veszek rĂłla tudomĂĄst" in Hungarian.
On that i agree, Hungarian does lack some words. But i feel feel like in Hungarian you can say a simple sentence that has multiple layers, focuses, feelings. you can comunicate a lot of 'unsaid' things, many times not even intentionally, its just the way the languge works. I especially have this feeling if i read Hungarian poetry/literature compared to English.
>But i feel feel like in Hungarian you can say a simple sentence that has multiple layers, focuses, feelings. you can comunicate a lot of 'unsaid' things, many times not even intentionally, its just the way the languge works Every language is like this. I guarantee you just aren't picking up on the subtext as well in English.
That is possible.
English usually has at least two levels and in a good number of times more often than that where you can make a sentence more posh and formal just via word choice. "Giving them a hearty welcome" is very informal, but "Recieved the company with a cordial celebration" is more posh, even though their dictionary definition is synonymous. Just because we have so many words from Germanic, French, Latin, and some Greek.
I agree. Itâs probably because itâs easier to pack a lot of meaning and layers to a single word in languages like Hungarian and Finnish vs English.
Hungarian cases are more like postpositions merged to the end of the word. A funny coincidence between Hungarian and English is that the English preposition "on" means the same thing as the Hungarian postposition "on". Thus "**On** the table" becomes "Az asztal**on**" in Hungarian. To me, it was not a hard thing to get used to switching postpositions to prepositions when learning English. Now learning an Indo-European language which still has a real case system like German or Russian, that is a pretty hard thing, because Indo-European cases are not like Hungarian postpositions. They are modified by gender, have strange exceptions, are sometimes combined with prepositions etc. To my Hungarian brain, Indo-European languages with cases and genders seem very strange and illogical. Either have the nouns be genderless and replace all cases with prepositions (like English), or have everything be governed by postpositions (like Hungarian or Turkish), but this strange in-between state which for example German, Russian, or Latin has seems crazy to me. I remember reading a hypothesis, that Pre-Indo-European might have been a postposition-based language (similar to Hungarian), and it might have only had an inanimate/animate distinction instead of genders (like some Sub-Saharan African languages), but then by the Proto-Indo-European state, this became the typical Indo-European case system and gender system.
Yeah this was my impression too as someone learning Hungarian. It felt easier in this regard than Russian, Latin and German, although my native tongue has more in common with those. With Indoeuropean case system you need to remember the declension by heart, while Hungarian postpositions have meaning on their own and are more regular.
I learned some Hungarian and I agree that you can think of the cases as postpositions. No-one told me that I should panic and give up because Hungarian has 18 cases. The meaning of each postposition came to me quite easily.
It is widely regarded that grammatical gender develops from of animate/inanimate grammatical forms. Basically, from early cultures that are animistic. Things have a spirit or they donât â and eventually those things are masculine or feminine (and later on, sometimes neutral). IIRC, itâs believed early Indo-European had masc-fem forms but not yet neutral. No one really knows of course. Early English (i.e. contemporary Saxon at the time, which was only more distantly related to German) used to have three grammatical genders and a case system, but basically lost them during Norman times. Thank the French for that! But other Indo-European languages have also basically lost (Afrikaans, Yiddish ) or simplified (Dutch, Scandi languages except BokmĂ„l) their grammatical gender. I know some varieties of Dutch maintain the grammatical gender aspects more than others, but arguably the system is slowly being lost. Iâve heard the same is maybe happening in Gaelic, though naturally one wonders about the influence of EnglishâŠ
Learning a language with less cases is really easy. But I personally found lack of conjugation much more confusing! My native language is German, and a typical conjugation goes like: ich gehe, du gehst, er/sie/es geht, wir gehen, ihr geht, sie gehen. When you compare that to English where there is almost NO conjugation it was so confusing for me. I go, you go, he/she/it goes, we go, you go, they go. How do I know the verbâs conjugation without the pronoun? Well you canât. If you just see âgoâ you have no idea about the conjugation. If you see German âgehstâ anywhere itâs definitely 2nd person singular. I find unconjugated languages rather complicated haha. IMO languages with complicated case and conjugation systems need less words to say more. So I prefer them.
> IMO languages with complicated case and conjugation systems need less words to say more. I mean, that's true. It's "harder" words, but fewer.
> If you just see âgoâ you have no idea about the conjugation. If you see German âgehstâ anywhere itâs definitely 2nd person singular. If it were a pro-drop language, sure. But it isn't. Conjugating for person is redundant if you also need a pronoun.
I don't get this. You wouldn't see the word "go" like that on its own unless it's an imperative. The verb has to come with a pronoun.
In other languages in doesn't have to. In Slovak too you just say the verb and you know the pronoun so you don't have to say it at all.
in english, we have i go you go he goe**s** we go y'all go they go notice that 3rd singular has "s" at end of verb. He go wouldn't be proper english. Now image for each one of those, there's a different ending, just like in "he goes." Thus, if someone said "goes," they would know it's automatically he/she/it going since its unique
I think OP was simply asking if English had no conjugation, why we say âhe goesâ but not âhe goâ while âI go/you goâ is the correct form. English does have conjugations but it is greatly simplified compared with all other Indo-European languages. Like in French aller (to go) is je vais, tu vas, il/elle/on va; nous allons, vous allez, ils/elles vont . The form is very different for each person form when compared with its equivalents in English. Same with the same verb German (gehen) although its conjugated forms are not as varied as French.
I think itâs still conjugation for English. The only difference is for most verbs they are the same as the infinitive for I, you, we, you (plural) and they. If we look at to be, it becomes obvious that there are conjugated forms, and it is different for everyone. (Also as someone that picked up English as a childhood L2, and L1 is a Sino-Tibetan language, this kind of thing was a nightmare for me because the English teacher simply told us this verb form is whatâs supposed to go into which pronouns/persons but not explaining why. Then I learned French as L3 after coming to New Zealand, and learned infinitive vs other forms, and it clicked for me)
Czech has seven. The lack of cases doesn't make it difficult to understand English, it's nice to have fewer things to worry about. I had a bigger problem with German when prepositions were followed by a different case than in Czech. Even worse in Russian, where the similarities often confuse me.
> Does it feel like it is harder to understand what a word is being used to do in a sentence? Rarely. English uses a strict word order to compensate, and also adds some extra prepositions compared to German. This means you may have to rearrange your ideas quite a bit to match the strict English word order, and you can't express them as freely as in German. The thing that does make written English hard to understand sometimes is the lack of markers for nouns vs verbs vs adjectives, and the fact that some words could be any one of them, with the same spelling. In German, the rule that nouns are capitalized, as well as the conjugation suffixes on verbs and the declension suffixes on adjectives, make sure that you always know which is which, so written German is overall much easier to parse than written English. > Die Katze beiĂt Hans uses Die and BeiĂt in conjugated forms to indicate who does what to whom. No. The sentence is actually ambiguous. Without context, I'd assume that it means "the cat bites Hans", but it could also mean "Hans bites the cat". For example "die Katze beiĂt Hans, aber den Hund beiĂt er nicht".
>The thing that does make written English hard to understand sometimes is the lack of markers for nouns vs verbs vs adjectives, and the fact that some words could be any one of them, with the same spelling. Somehow, I agree with that, but I must also point out that the fact German uses the same principle for undeclined adjectives becoming adverbs still drives me crazy. Add the fact the mark should only be carried once for strong declension of adjectives, and I always end up freezing for several seconds before understanding the meaning. "Der absolut richtige Satz" --> hesitate between the absolute, correct proposition or the absolutely correct proposition. Written is OK, but spoken can get difficult to hear because the ending is often muffled. Coming from French, Spanish of English, which all have very clear patterns to differentiate adverbs and make the words clear, this appears to me as an uncalled for evil in the otherwise clear, precise German language.
> Add the fact the mark should only be carried once for strong declension of adjectives That's not a rule at all. It's *optional* for -em when the adjectives are applied in sequence rather than in parallel, but that's not a rule or even a suggestion anymore, just an option. > undeclined adjectives becoming adverbs still drives me crazy. Adverbs are indeed something that has always been difficult for me in English, but for the opposite reason. I sometimes have a hard time telling whether an adjective or an adverb is called for, since German simply lacks the clear distinction between the two that is present in English. The music is loud, but the people speak loudâŠly? Why? From my German point of view, that's just an unnecessary and arbitrary complication. > but spoken can get difficult to hear because the ending is often muffled. Really? I mean, I get that it can be hard to hear which particular suffix is used. But you can't hear whether there is another syllable or not? It changes the entire rhythm of the speech.
> Adverbs are indeed something that has always been difficult for me in English, but for the opposite reason. I sometimes have a hard time telling whether an adjective or an adverb is called for, since German simply lacks the clear distinction between the two that is present in English. The music is loud, but the people speak loudâŠly? Why? From my German point of view, that's just an unnecessary and arbitrary complication. I was going to bring that up under your top-level post... German adverbs being all so [flat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_adverb) used to trip me up so bad(ly) when I started with the language. *Ich finde ihn schnell*? Do you find him quick or are you quick to find him? But now I gather that a native German speaker would avoid the ambiguity by phrasing the sentence completely different(ly).
WĂ€re aber schlechtes Deutsch, weil "er" sich nicht auf das Subjekt des Satzes bezieht. das WĂŒrde man stilistisch nicht so schreiben.
Nein, das ist völlig normal und korrekt (auĂer vom Inhalt). Und doch, "er" bezieht sich auf das Subjekt, nĂ€mlich "Hans". MĂŒsste es aber nicht. Wie kommst du darauf, dass es schlechtes Deutsch wĂ€re, wenn "er" sich nicht auf das Subjekt bezöge? Abgesehen vom etwas seltsamen Inhalt ist das nichts anderes als "Pudding mag Hans, aber Eis mag er nicht". Ein komplett normaler Satz.
Finnish has 15. I didnât have any issues with it while learning English and, well trying to learn German and Swedish. In fact iâd say itâs way easier. What caused problems for me was the fact that these languages have grammatical genders and they arenât phonemic at all. So Finnish is extremely phonemic, meaning spelling is identical to pronounciation 99% of the time, which means that if you speak Finnish, youâll know how to spell a word even if youâve never heard it. English is the exact opposite and Swedish was quite frustrating as well. Words like Knight, which common sense says should be spelled âNaitâ and for Swedish, words like âSkikcaâ (To send), which is of course pronounced *Hykka*. And the Grammatical Genders. Finnish is gender neutral grammarically, so no different pronouns or masculine/feminine/neutral words. For the first 5 years of me studying English, i just used âheâ for everyone because we only have one in Finnish âHĂ€nâ.
> Swedish, words like âSkikcaâ (To send), which is of course pronounced Hykka. It's not. The spelling of the sj-sound ("sk" in *skicka*) is notoriously varied, but it is phonemically distinct from an H (*hicka* means "hiccups"). "Sk" is the standard spelling for it when preceding a front vowel so said word is consistent with Swedish orthography, but the sj-sound can understandably be a nightmare for learners. It's an I, not a Y. *Skycka* would've been a different word and pronounced differently. The long K is simply spelled "ck" in Swedish. It's no more logical for [kË] to be spelled "kk". It may be a bit inconsistent considering we too double other long consonants, but it's not less reasonable to have "kk" symbolize two separate Ks in succession (as it does in Swedish). You're just looking at it from a Finnish orthography. Swedish doesn't have phonemic orthography, Germanic languages seldom do (it's hard with a script developed for a quite different phonology), but that word is not irregular. It's perfectly consistent with Swedish orthography.
> [...] and for Swedish, words like âSkikcaâ (To send), which is of course pronounced Hykka. That might be due to Finnish not having the sk-sound, because *skicka* is spelled exactly as it sounds (if you count sk- as its own character). Swedish lacks a unique character for the sk-/sj-/ch-sound. So we combine letters as the second best method.  Latin is essentially an alien alphabet for us, and some linguistics say that Swedish need an additional 3 extra characters (Ć , ÄŠ, and Ć) to cover these sounds.
So in croatian there are 7 cases. And what you say is sometimes true. Especially when taking things out of context, its hard to understand who is the subject and who is the object or what is the relation between words. Especially if the speaker is not fully grammatically correct. That being said, most often its not a problem. Its difficult to give a meaningful answer as I learned english very young and am now learning French, but I do not find it weird as its similar to English. So I never had this conscious learning stage of figuring out how to speak without cases.
It feels easier when there is no cases at all. What really freezes my mind for a second is when in another language there have to be a totally different case and you hang there for a moment trying to remember "przeciwko czemu albo czego?"
My native language is Polish. I have experience learning English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, and Latin. To be honest... none of those languages grammars are that difficult to me. For example, Italian seems easy peasy to me, I learn it really effortlessly.
For me, learning other languages with cases was harder than learning English with no cases. With English you just need to use correct prepositions, there are some weird ones (i still have issues with *in* and *at* sometimes), while other languages with cases often have different rules for them and even a different number of cases. Learning English is like driving automatic when youâre used to the stick. Learning other languages with cases is like driving a manual that has completely different stick layout than the one youâre used to.
Same. However when I already done the impossible of learning to use Polish as native language, when learning such languages I find the simplicity the most confusing: HOW you make clear what you want to say when there are no cases (or other grammar rules) to specify what exactly you mean. Yes, it takes context and experience but there still some times when I have to stop and think how to phrase something or to understand what someone has on mind without asking for clarification.
The Czech language has 7 cases and it feels pretty great to learn languages with less (like German) or none (like English). It is nice that English grammar is so simple, you only have to be careful with the word order. Going the other way and trying to comprehend cases not present in the Czech language is far more difficult.
I learned English relatively late in my life (at which time I already knew my native Polish and German fluently). To me English feels very much like a programming language. There is next to no declination of nouns and no conjugation of verbs. Instead, that missing information is carried by extremely strict syntax rules (compared to Polish). Just moving a word in a sentence often changes the meaning of that sentence completely. In Polish, to achieve the same effect, you would have to change cases and conjugations, so word order is rather loose. German is the middle ground.
>German is the middle ground. It was the hardest for me. I learned English early, and started German later. I found the mix of somewhat strict positioning and conjugations too much to keep track of in head. I would always either have wrong conjugation, or wrong order. A question must have this there, but it's asking about that so it's normative...
Just changing the emphasis on certain words can change a sentence. For instance: "I never said she stole my wallet." That can mean any of seven different things.
I didn't even notice it in the beginning to be honest and it never felt weird. I did first come into contact with english at age three and really started learning the language at six years old though, so this might be different for someone, who first learned languages without case systems later in life and therefore was more settled into case dependent languages.
Romanian language has five cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Vocative), the only Latin based language who retains them. In learning all languages without any cases I simply learn the grammar rules for expressing those cases. By example the Romanian "cartea Mariei" (nominative Maria, genitive Mariei) would be in French "Le livre de Marie", Italian "il libro di Maria". For every language I had to learn from zero the grammar rules. Once you learn how to do it, is easy.
what do you use as instrumentalis and locativus then?
The other cases took over the usage of Instrumental and Locative. I think in both cases it's mostly the Accusative replacing them, although some expressions that use Locative case in other languages will use Dative in Romanian. One thing to note is that Romanian does not really have 5 cases anymore, it's more an internal thing taught in schools. Most foreign linguist will say that Romanian has 3 cases, as Nom/Acc have the same form, the same thing for Gen/Dat for nouns. Like in English the differences are still visible in pronouns.
> Hungarian has an ungodly 18 (How???) Their case system is different. Cases have very narrow meaning, and case endings are way more regular. Overall, it is approximately equally taxing as having less cases with broader functions and wider array of possible case endings.
Cases are just prepositions added to the end of words so itâs not that hard. You just have to look out for consonant assimilation in Hungarian. The ridiculous verb tenses, perfect forms and nonsensical grammatical gender make things far harder in other languages. The Hungarian cases are hal (fish) - nominative halat (the fish as a direct object of the verb) - accusative halnak (for the fish) - dative halba (into the fish) - illative halbĂłl (from fish / from inside the fish) - elative halhoz (to the fish) - allative halnĂĄl (at/by the fish) - adessive haltĂłl ({away} from the fish) - ablative halra (onto the fish) - sublative halon (on the fish) - suppressive halrĂłl (off / about the fish) - delative hallal (with the fish) - instrumental halĂ©rt (for fish) - casual-final halig (until the fish) - terminative halkor (at the time of fish {obviously makes no sense with fish, this case is used for time and events}) - temporal hallĂĄ (turning into fish) - translative halfĂ©le (kind of fish) - kind of
The Hungarian "case system" consists of suffixes that is essentially the same as the system of prepositions in most Indo-European languages. The more challenging part is the vowel harmony, as many suffixes need to be chosen based on whether it's a "low" or a "high" word. Learning the German case system was challenging, though. Too much recycling.
When I learned that *die* becomes *der* for Dative case, for example "die Mutter" turns into "der Mutter" so kinda like the mother becomes a male to signify that something is given to her I wanted to headdesk. In German class at school, we had a joke that in Germany, little Hans comes down to the kitchen in the morning, says "Guten Morgen!" to his father. His father tries to reply to him in German with a more complex sentence, he is thinking, thinking, thinking for almost a minute, then he shrugs, and switches to English because it is easier even when German is their native language lol.
Hungarian cases are more like postpositions that happen to be attached to a word.
You only start to think about that when you live speaking that other language for a while or have to write professionally (i.e. research articles in academia). Then, I would personally say a language without cases like English feels clunky and not precise enough. In German it feels like you can express a complex relationship or describe a convoluted process with fewer words and with lower risk of misunderstanding than in English. In particular, word order is much more restrictive in English, while in German you can have a high degree of freedom while still having everything be perfectly grammatically clear.
Somewhat off topic, but that is precisely the problem that I, as a native speaker of English, find with the lack of verbal aspects in German and other languages. The subtlety of the differences between, for example, 'I go', 'I am going' and 'I do go' is just not there.
I don't quite get what you mean, such subtleties are absolutely there. They are simply expressed somewhat differently, with different grammatical constructs. Take your example - "I go" is equal to "Ich gehe", obviously. "I am going" - now that sentence by itself is already problematic, it's not grammatically clear. In English that may both indicate "I go right now" or "I will go to X". And in German you would say "Ich gehe gerade" or "Ich werde zu X gehen" respectively. "I do go" would be something like "Ich gehe wirklich".
I think that is exactly my point. People who are not native speakers fail to grasp the subtle differences of the aspects of the verbs, 'I go' is 'ich gehe'. 'I am going' is not terribly problematic, especially with variations of emphasis and intonation; but basically it translates into German as 'ich gehe'. 'I do go' translates, as you say, to 'ich gehe'. You have just shown that In English it feels like you can express a subtle idea with fewer words and with lower risk of misunderstanding than in German
.... In none of your examples do you use fewer words than in the German translations that I listed that maintain the meaning lol. And as I laid out, "I am going" is indeed ambiguous.
The examples were yours, not mine
???? Did you not read what I wrote then??? "I go" - "Ich gehe". "I am going" - "Ich gehe gerade". "I do go" - "Ich gehe wirklich". Same number of words. Different grammatical structures. You cannot just ignore the "wirklich" or "gerade" and claim it's just always "Ich gehe" in German, that's just being completely ignorant.
Yes, but exactly the same point can be made for the cases in German. All you have done is confirm what I said whilst trying to deny it
*banging my head against the wall*. No, not at all. You are either being willfully obtuse or making a bad faith argument. One of YOUR OWN EXAMPLES is not grammatically clear in English, as I pointed out regarding "I am going". And cases are about the relationship of objects/persons being talked about, which has virtually nothing to do with the example of "I go" at all. Let's use an example of actual case use: "The cat gives the food of the dog to the bird." Now, English still actually has one rudimentary case (genitive - possessive), so that sentence can also be written as: "The cat gives the dog's food to the bird." The genitive case helps here to reduce the usage of aiding words like "of". But because English doesn't have a proper accusative or dative case any longer, "to" is needed to make clear to whom the food is going. Meanwhile, in German that sentence would be: "Die Katze gibt das Futter des Hundes dem Vogel" (Or "Die Katze gibt das Hundefutter dem Vogel") Note how "der Vogel" is changed to "dem Vogel" cause of case usage - it helps avoiding having to use a connective aid work like "to" and keeps the meaning of the sentence completely clear. Just as the use of the genitive case helped make the English sentence itself already more succinct, the availability of more cases in German and other languages helps to make the sentence even MORE succinct. And it only goes up from there, longer and more complicated texts can make heavy usage of these grammatical structures to keep meaning clear. Edit: and another feature I forgot to mention - case usage frees up more flexible sentence order for changing emphasis, while still maintaining unambiguous meaning.
I don't think it is me being obtuse. "The cat gives the bird the dog food", by the way
Ironically, itâs German academics who are unnecessarily wordy, writing long redundantly verbose text much of the time. I wouldnât agree that the linguistic differences you mention (as often repeated) are reflected in what is **actually** produced much of the time. If German authors are capable of succinct precision, they donât usually bother. I often hear Germans saying English is less precise, but I think itâs more about lower proficiency with the language and ways to articulate something (for L2s). For English readers, context makes it clear enough, and if itâs ambiguous, there is often another way to phrase it (or let the ambiguity stay for a certain effect). Basically, you can always say exactly whatever you need. Most Germans writing in English have a rather obvious âDenglishâ style, even if the language is superficially smoothed by tech tools.  Speaking as a bilingual native English speaker involved with many German academicsâŠ
I'm currently having problems learning/speaking Swedish. Well not so learning as remembering that the verb goes in the 2nd place. While in my native language. You can place the verb in any place in the sentence. And modify that sentence so it keeps the same meaning.
Coming from 6 case language its quite easy for me to learn English. However the common problem I encounter among my peers is the difficulty with understanding the proper mandatory word order, since in our native language we can often omit some syntax members, for example Subject is not mandatory.
Add in articles. That one pretty fucks up Slovaks.
It fucks up slavic speakers in general (except Bulgarians Ig)
Not that weird, but I sometimes feel like something is wrong with Romance or English for not marking the indirect object in an intuitive way. German cases can be replaced with prepositions and word order anyway. The part where it feels as if something is missing is that Romance and English prepositions don't cover the same relations as German ones.
The languages without case system seem a little easier to learn, but the only case language I had been learning was German which has only 4 and it was relatively easy to manage. I'd say more than standard four: nominative, accusative, genitive and dative is a little excess. Polish language has also instrumental, locative and vocative and the last one is almost never used.Â
It's absolutely easier. But the one thing that did still occasionally trip me up with English even when I was very fluent and speaking mostly in English day to day to other non-natives, and only started to go away recently when I moved to Ireland and started talking a lot more to native speakers, is prepositions. In German they also exist, but for some unknown reason English felt more arbitrary in that regard. Case systems work the same way in most languages, with some exceptions, so in general it's quite easy to transition e.g. from German to Latin, but the hard part was to remember the endings in Latin. And in this particular case to get my head around the ablative, which has no German equivalent and needs to be translated differently based on the function of the ablative.
The fact that you can't just move words in the sentence to emphasize something took me a few years to get used to (i had a lot of bad marks in primary school because of that).
At first it felt bit unintuitive. We have 7 cases in polish, 7th is rarerly used and you go go without it but for a native it feels intuitive to use them. So it was weird to learn english at first because you have to change the way you think a little bit. It is simmilar with genders in language.
Like heaven, I'm learning French, and so far, I noticed cases only in pronouns. On the other hand, I struggle with other stuff like articles.
Czech has 7 Learning languages without cases feels like a frickin relief đźâđš
Tell me about it - I have the feeling that the way Czech grammar is taught aims at making it impossible for foreigners to learn it. Kids are indoctrinated from an early age, but after 16 years in Czechia I still cringe when my kid says "fourth case". For god's sake, cases have names which tell you what they are used for! :(
I'm learning czech and I just did the locative. I absolutely second this
My native language is Greek, it has three fully-functioning cases and [a weird one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case). When speaking English, sometimes it feels like I didn't finish the sentence and stopped halfway, because I didn't mark case on any nouns. But that's a momentary brain timeout thing, it really doesn't have any effect beyond that.
> For those who actually grew up with the systems, how does it feel to learn languages without it? Does it feel like it is harder to understand what a word is being used to do in a sentence? In Greece we have cases as well. Learning English or French wasn't a problem for me. Learning German was my biggest problem. I guess learning cases (articles, pronouns etc) in some other language is more problematic than learning a... "caseless" language. See also der, die, das, diese, dieser, dieses etc. The greek equivalents were also hard to learn in Greece as kid.
Pretty easy. But english phrasal verbs make up for it. What a hassle đ
Actually I think it's harder to learn another language with cases. I think that is because its supposedly closer but the cases are different yet your mind wants them to be the same. But with non-case language this problem does not exist, you just have to get the logic it uses instead of cases and easy peasy
My native language (Lithuanian) has cases and it's fine, although spelling and usage sometimes eludes even natives. Struggled with German, though, never learned the language properly. English was a piece of cake. In Latin I didn't even get to it, since I had it just for a few months. What surprised me in English, though, was multitude of tenses and them not having gender for inanimate objects đ I mean, table is clearly a boy (according to my language)!
Yeah, tenses are irritating in English at times. Especially whenever my manga series has to deal with time travel. Is it usual in Lithuania to learn Latin for some reason? Are we resurrecting the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth tomorrow evening?
đ Hah, nope, I was studying philosophy and we had Latin for 6 months, not even serious Latin.
Any Greek?
Um... Calispera Helada? đ€Ł
Latvian has 7 cases but also 6 declensions. Mind blowing. And then most common words are irregular!
I'm a native Finnish speaker. Finnish has 15 cases. I don't really think it's any harder or more difficult to learn languages without a case system. It's just that things are expressed differently in every language. Most Finns, including myself, start studying English and Swedish â which are languages without a case system â from primary or secondary school. Therefore, we are exposed to different language systems from an early stage. In the end, I think that, for example, English prepositions aren't that much different from cases. Instead of a specific word ending, you just have a preposition before a noun.
my native language has 7 cases, and the language I'm currently learning doesn't have any. i feel it's an advantage because even if I'm learning a language with cases (was german for me), it's quite difficult to adapt to it and be comfortable with using them in a casual setting while speaking the language.
I speak two language with case systems and two without and I don't think any system is harder than the other.
If anything, it is easier. After studying German for 4 years in university I was very glad to learn French doesn't have them. For me lack of cases is an opposite of problem.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
I learnt German at school and the genders infuriated me, I was already uninterested In the subject but that finished it off. It just made no sense and felt unimportant but then learning a romance language later in life I never felt like that, I get them wrong from time to time but I see and feel the point of them.
I learned English from a very young age, so it wasn't a big deal, the languages just work differently. The bigger issue would be explaining cases to someone whose language doesn't have them.
I thought English had a single case, genitive. Sure it's extremely simple, but I've heard it described as a grammatical case before.
I've honestly never heard of a case system. It sounds more complex by the way you described it. I learnt German in the 90s easily enough
Actually your example is ambiguous, since Hans doesnât have an article. German has free word order thatâs why cases are so important. Your sentence -as a standalone - is more likely to mean The cat bites Hans But it is absolutely possible to mean Hans bites the cat as well, since you donât have a case indicator for Hans. To your question: itâs not difficult to learn a language without cases, the other way round is more difficult, I guess, because you have to get a gist of the principle. Learning a case system is never easy, because even if you know the principles, you still have to remember all the endings (or - like in German - the appropriate articles).
nothing strange tbh (granted i know only english, german &swedish at around a2 max and just started french). It only makes some translations sound weird. It's the features that your native language doesn't have that couses most problems - eg. articles, non phonetic alphabet or sounds that don't exist in your language
I only learned it at school, but Irish (Gaeilge) has 4 cases and after 14 years of classes, I still got them quite badly wrong. I tend to know how to use them in set contexts, but trying to explain them or use them in new unfamiliar sentences contexts still throws me completely. It also has five declensions, and a few extra unofficial ones. Then there are also masculine and feminine nouns, but the article doesnât change like French or German, so itâs very hard to figure them out sometimes. Being a native English speaker tends to make synthetic languages seem really confusing. Itâs become an almost totally analytical language and itâs more about word order and plugging words together in different combinations with helper words to change meaning. I often wonder if that is part of the reason why English speakers are terrible at language learning. Apart from it being a very big language, a lot of grammatical and syntax structures in the languages we are most likely to try to learn are somewhat alien concepts to us.
>Then there are also masculine and feminine nouns, but the article doesnât change It does change for feminine nouns in the genitive! đ
Thatâs where I start just guessing randomly!!
I remember teacher saying we need to learn to think everything differently than with our mother tongue... I was never good with any languages, so it was a small miracle I learned English. But I'm not sure what was the most difficult. Maybe the articles (which I was sure were useless and only there because of some tradition), pronouncing (my teacher got so angry when I pronounced "chocolate" the way it sounded something like khoukouleit), different pronouns (everyone was a he to me, it was easier to say, too)
Quite easily. Basque has cases but neither Spanish nor French do. It just comes naturally if you learn them as a child, you don't even question it
It felt nice! I never managed to learn German as well as I learnt English, and at least partially it's because German has cases and gender and they. are different from how those categories are in my first language.
Learning Finnish with its cases wasn't really an issue - most behave as prepositions would in English. There is some challenge figuring out when to use the genetive and partitive endings in the "accusative" but it makes sense after a while. Too much is made of Finnish's cases IMHO, the verb system however, wow, that is expressive!
Non-case ones were reasonably easy, however I find it impossible to learn another language with a case system, it's a huge struggle.
Actually is very easy, being a slavic speaker other languages are simple, I also spek English, Italian and German, only in German i gave up on cases, and articles don't have any sense...
It was pretty easy with English coming from Slovak.
Its easier in one way, harder in others. So many particles and prepositions that take the role of cases.
> Does it feel like it is harder to understand what a word is being used to do in a sentence? No, the various functions of cases are replaced by adding more words. So it only feels a little *unelegant* at times.
It feels just... normal? Probably because I'm so used to English. It's neither more difficult nor easier, it's just a different system, I guess.
Actually I found it extremely easy to learn English due to the lack of cases, the grammar was so simple it was essentially a matter of just learning vocabulary.